_______________________

September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth.  To generate interest in the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast are going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
________________________

________________________

With the work of John Logie Baird and others prior to 1927, the prehistory of video was electro-mechanical.^⁠1  Much the same can be said of computers.  

From Abacus to Babbage

Counting and calculating devices stretch back as far as recorded history. The Mesopotamians moved pebbles on a board to make calculations in ~2500 BC. Indeed, the word “calculus” derives from the Latin for “pebble.”  The Greeks and Romans used calculating boards from ~500 BC onward, and the Chinese developed the bead-frame abacus in ~200 BC.  

The first known use of gears for calculating numbers was found in the Antikythera Mechanism, built sometime in the first century BCE, discovered in a shipwreck off the Greek Island of Antikythera in 1901^⁠2, and still a source of great mystery to this day.  

The modern quest for mechanized calculating began in earnest in 1642, when French mathematician Blaise Pascal developed the Pascaline, the first post-antiquity machine to use gears to perform addition and subtraction. In 1801, another Frenchman, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, devised a system that used punch cards that transformed the common textile loom into a programmable machine – arguably laying the conceptual groundwork for modern computing. 

And in 1837, the English polymath Charles Babbage designed and built the “Difference Engine” – a fully mechanical, general-purpose computing device with components that presage the architecture of a modern CPU and RAM.^⁠3

Enter Electrons

Electricity came to calculating in 1890, when American inventor Herman Hollerith built the Tabulator, which used punch cards and electric circuits to process the U.S. Census.^⁠4 

At Bletchley Park outside of London during World War II, British mathematician Alan Turing led the top-secret development of the Bombe, an electro-mechanical device that helped crack the Nazi Enigma code, a pivotal turning point in the Allies’ final final victory. 

And in 1945, physicist John W. Mauchly and engineer J. Presper Eckeret at the University of Pennsylvania built the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) – the first fully electronic, general-purpose programmable computer. ENIAC used 18,000 vacuum tubes, weighed 30 tons and filled an entire room, but could complete in seconds calculations that previously took hours or days.

What we think of as a computer today didn’t take shape until somebody had the bright idea to attach a cathode ray tube to an electronic computing machine. That finally happened in the middle of the 20th century.  

Enter Screens

In 1950, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) unveiled “Whirlwind,” the first digital computer capable of real-time processing. Originally commissioned by the U.S. Navy to simulate flight dynamics for pilot training, Whirlwind evolved into something far more ambitious—a high-speed, general-purpose computer that could process data and display it in real time on a CRT.  

At MIT, Jay Forrester (Project Director), Robert Everett (Chief Engineer), Charlie Adams, David Sayre, and a rotating crew of engineers repurposed a surplus radar display and developed digital-to-analog conversion circuits.  That enabled the system to render computer-generated graphics directly onto the screen.

With the addition of the CRT, the MIT team could see results as they were calculated.  The addition of the CRT turned the computer from a static calculating engine into a dynamic system, a concept that would become central to every digital device to follow, from radar consoles to video games, personal computers, and smartphones. 

The first integration of video and computing technology in 1950 raises an interesting question: if electronic television had not been invented in the 1920s and developed through the 1930s and ’40s, would cathode ray tubes  have been refined enough to serve as  a computer display?

The answer, quite plausibly, is no. 

Starting with the sketch that teenaged Philo Farnsworth drew on a chalkboard in Rigby, Idaho, in 1922, CRTs were shaped by the demands of television^⁠5.  And without the Image Dissector that Farnsworth successfully tested in 1927, there would have been no electronic signal, no picture tube and no high-resolution CRT display.  

Once the concept was proven, the push was on to improve scanning methods, image resolution, phosphor sensitivity, and screen brightness. All the improvements introduced in the 1930s – not the least Farnsworth’s own 150-plus patents – started on his workbench in San Francisco. 

Without the engine of broadcast television pulling the train, without networks, advertisers and viewers all clamoring for brighter, sharper images, the CRT might never have achieved the resolution required for graphical computing.  And none of that would have been possible without an electronic camera that produced a high resolution video signal in the first place – and that was Farnsworth’s Image Dissector, regardless of its obvious shortcomings in its earliest incarnations. 

The cathode ray tube that found its way into millions of living rooms in the 1950s became the default display for digital data during the same period. The CRT became a viable computer display not because computing demanded it, but because television made it possible.  Starting with MIT’s Whirlwind, the evolution of graphical interfaces depended on video technology that owes its existence to Farnsworth’s first patent.  

From the Antikythera to the iPhone, from radar systems to video games, the now common, daily routine of modern computing – click click, look look – was first made possible by the scan lines meant for sitcoms, variety hours, and evening news.^⁠6  

So it is no exaggeration to say that every video screen on the planet can trace its origins to the sketch that Philo Farnsworth drew for his high school science teacher in 1922.

¹ If you’re not recognizing the name of John Logie Baird, revisit Countdown #96.

² If the reference here sounds vaguely familiar, that might be because you saw  the 2023 film Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.  The object of Indie’s quest in that movie was called “Archimedes’ Dial” and was loosely based on Antikythera Mechanism.  The gadget in the movie is professed to have time travel powers, but the real artifact was an ancient Greek device for predicting astronomical events.

³ CPU = Central Processing Unit – the “brains” of an electronic computer; RAM = Random Access Memory, the circuitry where the calculations are performed.

⁴ In 1896, Herman Hollerith formed the Tabulating Machine Company, which would eventually merge with other companies to become International Business Machines (IBM) in 1924. Hollerith’s use of punched cards directly influenced early computer data storage and programming methods. See: Lars Heide, Punched-Card Systems and the Early Information Explosion, 1880–1945 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

⁵ The cathode ray tube (CRT) went through several stages of evolution in the late 19th century before its first use in television: 

1. Johann Wilhelm Hittorf (1869) – discovered “cathode rays,” streams of electrons moving through a vacuum;

2. Sir William Crookes (1870s) – built the Crookes tube, an early vacuum tube that visibly demonstrated the properties of cathode rays;

3. Karl Ferdinand Braun (1897) – invented the first oscilloscope-style CRT—a vacuum tube with a fluorescent screen used to display electrical waveforms, often considered the first practical CRT.

The idea of CRTs for television emerged in the early 20th century.  British scientist A.A. Campbell Swinton proposed a fully electronic system in a letter published in Nature magazine in June 1908;  Around the same time, Russian Boris Rosing developed a hybrid system using a mechanical camera and a CRT display, becoming the first to use a CRT to display a moving image.  Rosing’s experiments were observed by a student named Vladimir K. Zworykin, who applied for a U.S. patent for a similar system in 1923 after immigrating in 1921.  

Philo Farnsworth may have had knowledge of either Swinton’s proposal or Rosing’s experiments, but the receiving end of the television equation was always going to be the easy part.  With his Image Dissector – first successfully demonstrated in 1927 – Farnsworth was indisputably the first to come up with a fully electronic video camera.

⁶ Thanks to CBS Sunday Morning host Charles Osgood, who coined the phrase “click click, look look”  to describe his first experience of ‘writing’ on a word processor.

________________________